Tag: love

Breathe

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There is a list. You know the one. It starts early, earlier than you are ready for, and it does not stop. First it is the grades, because the grades determine everything, or so you are told at an age when you are still figuring out how to exist in a body and navigate a classroom and understand why any of it matters. Then it is the college, because the college determines the job, and the job determines the life, and the life is the whole point, so pay attention, keep up, do not fall behind. And you try. You really try. You study for exams that feel like the end of the world and you wait for results with a kind of anxiety that is completely disproportionate and completely understandable at the same time, because everyone around you has confirmed that yes, this matters, yes, this is the thing that will define what comes next.

And then what comes next arrives and there is a new list waiting.

This is the part nobody prepares you for. You spend years working toward something, a grade, an acceptance letter, a degree, and there is a moment, brief and quickly buried, where you think you will finally be able to exhale. And then the exhale does not come, because by the time you arrive somewhere, the next destination has already been decided and the pressure has already shifted shape and the chase has just updated its terms.

The college becomes the career. The career becomes the salary. The salary becomes the lifestyle. And somewhere further down the road, when you are still running and already tired, it becomes the relationship, the marriage, the home, the children, the children’s futures, and then you are the one standing over a younger person telling them that the grades matter, that this is the thing that will determine what comes next and the loop closes on itself completely.

I think about this a lot. More than is probably useful, more than I can do anything about in the immediate sense, but I think about it because I am in it and I can feel it and I cannot pretend otherwise. I am at the stage where academics and grades and the pressure of figuring out a career are all sitting on my chest at the same time, not taking turns but arriving together, and on top of the expectations that come from outside, from family, from the world, from the very reasonable question of what are you going to do with your life, I add my own.

I set standards for myself that have no ceiling. I hold myself to a version of productivity and achievement that I would never in a thousand years hold another person to. And when I do not meet those standards, which is often, because they are impossible, I do not rest. I feel guilty for not doing more, and then I get back to work, because working at least feels like moving forward, and moving forward feels like the only acceptable mode of existing right now.
I know this about myself. I can see it clearly. And I am still doing it, which is the specific kind of frustration that comes from understanding something completely and being unable to stop it.

But here is what I keep coming back to, the thing that sits underneath all the noise and the lists and the pressure. When does the actual living happen? Not the achieving, not the performing, not the becoming, but the living. The kind that does not produce anything. The kind that cannot be put on a CV or justified to anyone or filed under progress. I am talking about a random Tuesday afternoon that you remember years later not because something happened but because you were happy in it. A conversation that went nowhere and meant everything. A stretch of time that belonged to nobody’s expectations, not your parents, not your future employer, not the imagined version of yourself who has finally arrived somewhere and can finally relax.

Because that version keeps moving. Every time you get close, the goalpost shifts, and not always because someone else moved it. Often because you did. Because the bar you set for yourself rises automatically the moment you clear it, and rest starts to feel like a thing you have to earn, and you have not earned it yet, and maybe you never quite will.

I do not think this is unique to me. I think most people reading this have felt some version of it, are feeling some version of it right now. We live inside a structure that is very good at telling us what the next thing is and very quiet on the subject of whether the next thing is actually what we want. The path is so clearly laid out, so thoroughly validated by everyone who walked it before us, that it takes a real act of will to stop and ask whether you are on it because you chose it or because it was simply there and you were moving and this is the direction everyone around you was already heading.

And most of us do not stop. Because stopping looks like falling behind. Because the world is not set up to reward people who pause to ask questions about what they actually want. Because the people who love you have hopes for you that are bound up in the list, and disappointing them is its own kind of weight, and carrying that weight while also carrying your own is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to someone who has not felt it.

So we keep going. We keep our heads down and we keep moving and we tell ourselves that this phase will end, that there is a point ahead where the pressure lifts and the space opens up and life gets to be something you participate in rather than something that is happening at you. And maybe that is true. Maybe it is.

But I am tired of waiting to find out.
I am tired of the idea that living is something I have to schedule for later, after the degree, after the job, after I have become stable enough and successful enough to afford the luxury of a present tense. I do not want my twenties to be something I survived. I do not want to look back at this period of my life and see only a list of things I was trying to achieve, a blur of pressure and output with very little of myself actually in it.

I want to have been here for it. Even the hard parts. Even the uncertain, unresolved, not-yet-figured-out parts. I want to have been present for my own life while it was happening, which sounds like the most obvious thing in the world and is somehow the thing most of us are failing at completely.

I am not writing this from the other side of it. I have not figured this out. I am still in the middle of it, still adding pressure to pressure, still finding it almost impossible to sit still without the guilt arriving right behind me. But I am trying. I am trying to find the moments in the day that belong to nobody’s agenda but mine. I am trying to let a good thing be good without immediately scanning for what is still missing. I am trying to remember that the life I am waiting to live is actually this one, the one happening right now, in the mess and the uncertainty and the chase.

So if you are somewhere in this too, if you recognise the loop and you are exhausted by it and you cannot quite see your way out of it, I am not going to tell you to quit or to stop caring or to abandon the things you are working toward. I know it is not that simple. I know the pressure is real and the stakes feel real and the people waiting for you to succeed are real.

I will just say this.

Breathe a little.

Find something today that is not in service of the next thing. Not productive, not optimised, not moving you closer to anything on the list. Just something that is good right now, in this moment, for no other reason than that it is.

We have one life. Not one after we figure it out. Not one once the timing is right. This one, right now, with all its unfinished business and unanswered questions and pressure that does not let up.

It is already happening.

Be in it.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

Still Becoming

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There is a version of me that exists entirely in my own head and she is, I will be honest, a lot.

She wakes up at a reasonable hour and does not immediately reach for her phone. She responds to things on time. She finishes what she starts. She is present in conversations without half her brain already somewhere else, already planning, already composing, already three steps ahead of the moment she is actually standing in. She is consistent. She follows through. She does not start seventeen things and finish eleven of them and forget about the other six and then find them weeks later in her notes app, still waiting, still full of potential, a little accusatory.

I know her very well. I have been meaning to become her for years.

And then there is the version of me that actually shows up to the day. She is trying. That is the first thing I want to say about her, she is genuinely, constantly trying. But she is also scattered in the way that people are scattered when they care about too many things at once. She is late sometimes, not because she doesn’t care but because she was finishing something and then finishing one more thing and then suddenly time had done what time does. She starts too much. She feels too much. She takes on things with enormous enthusiasm and then discovers halfway through that she has also taken on four other things with enormous enthusiasm and now all of them are happening simultaneously and none of them are happening as well as they deserved.

The gap between these two people is something I have spent a lot of time being ashamed of.

Because from the outside the gap looks like a failure of discipline. Like if I just tried a little harder, organised a little better, wanted it enough, I could close the distance between who I am and who I meant to be by now. And some days I believe that. Some days the gap feels like evidence, like proof of something lacking, like a measurement of all the ways I have not yet managed to match my own expectations of myself.

But then there are other days. Days when I look at the gap differently and see something else in it entirely.

Because the gap only exists because the vision is real. You cannot fall short of something you were never reaching for. The version of me in my head, the consistent one, the present one, the one who finishes everything she starts, she is not a fantasy I invented to torture myself with. She is something I am genuinely moving toward. Slowly, imperfectly, with a lot of detours and restarts and days that look nothing like the plan. But moving.

And the version of me that actually shows up, the scattered one, the trying one, she is not the failure. She is the process. She is what becoming looks like from the inside, which is messier and more human and less linear than it looks from the outside or from the clean imagined future where I have finally figured it all out.

I think the gap is where I actually live. Not in the perfect version and not in the falling short but in the space between them, in the reaching. In the fact that I keep writing the to-do list even though I know it is too long. Keep starting the blog even though I might not finish it. Keep believing, without any particularly good evidence, that tomorrow I will be a little closer to the person I am trying to be.

Some days the gap feels like failure. I want to be honest about that because pretending it doesn’t would be its own kind of lie.

But some days it feels like the most alive part of me. The part that hasn’t given up on the vision. The part that keeps measuring the distance not to punish herself but because she still believes the distance can be crossed.

I don’t know when I will become the version of myself I carry around in my head. Maybe I will keep getting closer and the target will keep moving, which is its own kind of beautiful even when it is exhausting.

But I know this. The gap means I’m still going. Still trying. Still somewhere in the middle of a becoming that isn’t finished yet.

And on most days, that feels like enough to keep going with.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

Who Are You When Nobody Is Watching?

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Who Are You When Nobody Is Watching?

Most people will never know.
Not because the answer is hidden or complicated or requires some kind of spiritual excavation. But because looking requires a particular kind of courage that most of us, if we are being honest, do not have. It is easier to stay busy. To keep the noise up. To fill every quiet moment with a scroll or a conversation or anything, really, that keeps the silence from getting too loud.
Because silence asks questions.


We are performing constantly. Not occasionally, not in high-stakes moments, constantly. The version of you that shows up to work, to relationships, to family dinners, to the comment section, to the carefully worded text you rewrote four times before sending. That is not you. That is the edit. That is the version that has been sanded down and shaped by decades of learning what gets you accepted and what gets you rejected. We started that process so young that we have no memory of a time before it. The performance did not begin. It simply always was.

So who is underneath it?
That is the question most people spend their entire lives running from. Full calendars and full feeds and full rooms. Anything to avoid sitting alone with yourself long enough to find out what you actually think, what you actually want, what you actually are when there is no one left to perform for.

And here is the thing about the people who do go looking. It is not always pretty. The self you find in the unguarded moments, in the 3am thoughts you would never say out loud, in the way you feel things you were taught not to feel, that self is not the polished one. It is the one that holds the contradictions. The ugliness alongside the tenderness. The pettiness alongside the depth. The fear underneath everything.

Nobody is just one thing. But we live like we are because it is simpler that way. Cleaner. Easier to maintain. A single consistent character is so much less exhausting than the whole complicated truth of yourself.


The people who have actually sat with that truth, who have looked at the full picture and not just the flattering parts, who have felt the specific discomfort of being known to themselves completely, those people have done something most will not. And they did it without an audience. Without validation. Without anyone handing them credit for the hardest part.

That is what makes it brave. Not the figuring out. The going to look in the first place.
Because you do not know what you will find. That is the part nobody tells you. You might find someone softer than you expected. Someone angrier. Someone more afraid. Someone who has been carrying something for years that they never had the right words for. The journey inward is not a wellness exercise. It is a confrontation.
Most people sense this and turn back.

They choose instead to be whoever the room needs them to be. To wear the expectations handed to them like a second skin until they cannot feel where the expectations end and they begin. This is not weakness exactly. It is survival. We are social creatures living inside systems that reward legibility and punish complexity. Of course we simplify ourselves. Of course we perform. The world made it very clear, very early, what it wanted from us.

But that clarity came at a cost.
The cost is this: you can go your whole life being very good at being who everyone else needs you to be, and still die a stranger to yourself. Respected, maybe. Liked, probably. But never fully known. Not even by you.


That should terrify us more than it does.
The ones who refuse that fate are not doing something noble or enlightened. They are just doing something necessary. Asking a question most are too comfortable or too afraid to ask. Sitting in the discomfort of not knowing and staying there long enough to find out.

Who are you when nobody is watching?
If you do not know, that is worth more of your attention than almost anything else in your life right now.

If you do know, and you are still choosing the performance anyway, then at least you are doing it with your eyes open.

And if you are somewhere in the middle, still looking, still circling, still catching glimpses and then retreating, that is not failure. That is just the work. It does not end. The person you are in private keeps changing as you do. The question stays the same.

Keep going anyway.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

The People We Become For Different Places

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There is a version of me that only used to exist in my grandmother’s house. She didn’t know that, of course, but she had met a girl who spoke a little slower, laughed more freely, and didn’t once check her phone at the dinner table. That girl ate two extra rotis without guilt and sat with her legs folded under her on the sofa and didn’t feel even a little bit embarrassed about it. She was softer. She was somehow younger and more herself at the same time. I don’t know where she used to go when I left.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, the way places pull different people out of us. Not fake people, that’s the thing I want to be clear about. Not performances or masks or the kind of code-switching that you do because you have to. I mean something quieter and more involuntary than that. The way a city you love makes you walk differently. The way a room you grew up in makes you feel like your own problems have temporarily lost your address.

There is a version of me that lives in Jaipur and she is more serious, more efficient, more clipped. She knows exactly what she wants from a day. She has tabs open that she will actually use. There is another version that exists only on long train rides, who reads for four hours straight and doesn’t feel even a little bit guilty about not being productive, because what could be more productive than this, the whole city moving past outside the window and a book in your lap and nowhere you have to be for the next seven hours.

The interesting part is not that we change. Of course we change. The interesting part is that every single version feels completely real when you’re in it. You don’t feel like you’re pretending. You feel, if anything, more settled than usual. Like the place has made room for a part of you that was waiting for exactly that kind of permission.

I think some places give us permission. That’s the best way I can put it. My grandmother’s house gave me the permission to be unhurried. A train gives me permission to disappear. A city I visited once gave me permission to be curious in a way I rarely let myself be at home, where everyone already knows what kind of person I am and I have to keep being that.

That last one is the part that gets to me most honestly. At home, wherever home is, you are already known. People have already decided, with a lot of love and some amount of wrong assumption, who you are. And it is not that they are entirely wrong. It is just that you have expanded since they last checked and nobody has updated the file. So you walk around being slightly edited, slightly abbreviated, slightly smaller than what you actually are now. And then you go somewhere new and there is no file. You get to just be whatever you currently are. The whole thing. Unreviewed.

I wonder sometimes if that’s part of why travel feels so good even when the trip itself is objectively average. It’s not always the food or the view or the novelty. It’s the temporary suspension of your own reputation. You get to be interested in things without explaining why. You get to be quiet or loud or completely random without anyone reading it as something about your character. The place doesn’t have a theory about you yet.

And then there are places that know too much and still love you and those are somehow the most powerful of all. Because those places don’t give you freedom through anonymity. They give you freedom through acceptance. Which is a different thing entirely and honestly a rarer one.

I don’t think we ever become entirely different people in different places. I think we become specific parts of ourselves. Each place draws out something that was already there, something that just needed the right kind of light or noise or silence to finally surface. Some places bring out the version of you that knows how to rest. Some bring out the version that’s a little bit brave. Some bring out the version that misses people, deeply and without warning, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

What I’ve started believing is that all of these are real. The girl at her grandmother’s house was real. The person on the train is real. The edited, efficient, serious version at her desk is also real. None of them cancel the others out. They are all just different rooms inside the same person, and the places we go are just the keys.

I think that’s a kind thing to know about yourself. 

That you are more than one thing. 

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

Things I Thought Were Cool At 13

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I thought being quiet was a personality. Not shy quiet, not awkward quiet but cool quiet. The kind where you say just enough and let people wonder about the rest. I had this whole thing going where I’d walk into a room and not try too hard and I genuinely believed this was coming across exactly the way I intended. Like I had it figured out. Like I was someone. I was thirteen. I had nothing figured out and I was absolutely no one yet, which is of course the whole point of being thirteen, but nobody tells you that while it’s happening.

Cool at that age was such a specific thing. It wasn’t about being loud or popular necessarily, though that was part of it for some people. For me it was more about having a certain energy. Unbothered. Like things rolled off me. Like I had seen enough of life to not be surprised by it, which is genuinely hilarious because I had seen nothing. I was a child with strong opinions about what music meant you were serious and what music meant you weren’t, and I delivered these opinions with the confidence of someone who had earned them through years of experience I simply did not have.

There were songs I loved like they were mine. Artists I felt like I had discovered personally even though millions of people knew them. A specific way I wore things, carried myself, responded to people. Little things that felt like they added up to something. And the strange part is they did add up to something, just not what I thought at the time. What they added up to was a person trying very hard to become themselves, which is both embarrassing and also, from here, quite beautiful.

Because underneath all of that performance there was this feeling. This intensity that I don’t think I’ve ever fully found the right words for. Everything just hit so hard back then. A song could genuinely change the entire shape of your day. A conversation you had with someone could sit with you for weeks. You could be excited, properly excited, about something completely small and ordinary and feel it in your whole body. Nothing bounced off. Everything got in. You were just completely open to your own life in a way that felt normal then and feels almost impossible to imagine now.

And there was this curiosity too, this constant low hum of what’s next, what’s out there, who am I going to be. The future felt enormous and wide open and full of things you hadn’t discovered yet, and that was thrilling in a way that’s hard to explain to your adult self who has since discovered quite a lot of things. 

Everything felt like it could be the beginning of something. A new song could feel like a door opening. A new person could feel like a whole world. You were so hungry for all of it, so awake to it, so genuinely thrilled to be alive and right in the middle of it, even when you were doing your best to look like you couldn’t care less.

I didn’t know that was rare. I thought that was just what being alive felt like.

And then life happens. Slowly, gradually, through the ordinary accumulation of time and experience and things that don’t go the way you hoped. You get a little careful. You learn, without meaning to, how to arrive at things slightly protected. You still feel everything but there’s a small distance now between you and the full force of it. A buffer. And it’s reasonable, that buffer. You built it for good reasons. But you built it without realising, and by the time you notice it’s already just part of how you move through the world.

Adulthood is better in most ways. Genuinely. You figure out who you actually are. You stop performing and it gets quieter and easier. You make real choices. You care about things that actually matter to you instead of things that just seemed to matter to everyone else. The confidence you tried to fake at thirteen starts to become something real, something that comes from actually knowing yourself rather than just deciding to act like you do. That’s worth a lot. I wouldn’t trade it.

But I do think about thirteen sometimes. Not with embarrassment, or not only that. More with this ache that’s hard to explain. I think about that version of me walking around so guarded on the outside and so completely unguarded underneath. Feeling things at full volume. Not yet cracked or worn down or made careful by anything. Just alive in this specific, impenetrable way that I didn’t know to pay attention to while it was happening because I was too busy trying to seem like I wasn’t paying attention to anything.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about growing up. It’s not that you lose yourself. You actually find yourself, slowly, which is the whole point. But something else goes quiet in the process. That feeling of being so open the world could just walk straight into you. Of wanting things with your whole chest before you knew enough to wonder if wanting them was worth it. Of being completely, totally, embarrassingly alive before life had taught you any of its lessons yet.

You can’t get that back exactly. But every now and then something catches you off guard. A song, a smell, a particular kind of afternoon. And for just a second you’re back there. Thirteen, ridiculous, performing cool, feeling everything. And you think, yeah. That was something. 

I didn’t know it then, but that was really something.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

A bookstaversary, an algorithm, and the community that never lets you down

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There is a particular kind of dread that builds when you have been posting into what feels like a void. You make something with care, you hit share, and then you watch the numbers sit still, not moving, barely breathing, as if the internet has collectively decided to look the other way. That had been my reality for the past few posts, two or three in a row where the reach was so low it started to feel personal. So when my sixth bookstaversary came around and I was getting ready to post, I had already made a kind of peace with disappointment. I told myself it did not matter. I scheduled the post anyway.

Six years is not a small thing. It is a long time to love anything publicly, to keep showing up for a corner of the internet with your books and your thoughts and your photographs, through every algorithm change and every season of real life pulling you in different directions. This particular anniversary meant something to me, more than I think I fully let myself acknowledge before I hit post. But because I had already been bruised by a few quiet, reach-less weeks, I think I was protecting myself. Low expectations feel safer than hope when you have been consistently let down.

An hour passed. I almost did not open the app at all. I was bracing for maybe ten likes, a comment or two from the friends who always show up, and the familiar low-grade sting of a post that went nowhere. What I found instead was something I was completely unprepared for.

Over fifty likes. A flood of comments. DMs from people I had never once spoken to, not in posts, not through messages, not anywhere. Strangers, and yet not strangers at all.

I sat with my phone and just read. Every comment, every message. People were telling me congratulations and that six years was incredible and that my account had meant something to them. People whose names I recognised from other corners of bookstagram, people I had admired from a distance, people I had genuinely never encountered before were in my notifications telling me they were glad I was here. It was overwhelming in the very best way, the kind of overwhelmed that makes you exhale slowly and feel, for a moment, completely held.


And then the thought that arrived, and has not really left since: the people in your real life often do not show up the way you need them to. Not because they are bad people, but because real life is distracting and busy and not everyone understands what it means to have built something online over six years, to have poured genuine love into a bookish little corner of the internet for half a decade. It can be hard to explain why it matters. It can be hard to even ask for recognition for something that looks, from the outside, like you just posting pictures of books.

But bookstagram gets it. Bookstagram has always gotten it. There is something extraordinary about this community, something I think we forget when the algorithm is being unkind and the reach is low and it starts to feel like shouting into nothing. The people here are paying attention in a way that is easy to underestimate. They notice. They remember. They come out of the woodwork on the days that matter and they remind you, without you ever having to ask, that what you have built has weight and value and an audience that genuinely cares.


What this bookstaversary reminded me is that reach is not the same as connection. A post can perform quietly for weeks and still be landing somewhere, still be reaching someone who will remember it on the day they want to say something kind. The numbers that the algorithm shows you are not the full picture of who is watching and who values what you make. I had been measuring myself by a metric that was never really measuring the right thing.

Six years in, and this community still has the ability to completely surprise me. That feels like the most hopeful thing I can say. After all this time, after every change and every rough patch and every moment of wondering whether it was worth continuing, bookstagram can still make me feel like it was all worth it, in a single hour, on a random Friday, just by showing up.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

The Thirty Second Fix

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There was this one day, genuinely one of those days where everything just felt heavy for no single reason you could point to, and I put on a random episode of FRIENDS. Not because I thought it would help. Not because I was trying to feel better. Just because I needed something on in the background that wasn’t my own thoughts.

And somewhere in the middle of it, I laughed. Actually laughed. At something I’d probably seen four times before. And for like 30 seconds nothing was wrong.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing I want to talk about.

Because nobody tells you that sometimes that’s what getting through a bad day looks like. It doesn’t look like journaling or calling someone or going for a run or doing any of the things you’re supposed to do when you’re not okay. Sometimes it looks like lying on your bed at 7pm watching Chandler Bing make a sarcastic comment and feeling, just for a moment, like the world is a little more bearable than it was ten minutes ago.

I’ve started paying attention to these moments. The ones that don’t fix anything but somehow make the day survivable. A song that comes on and does something to your chest. Rereading a book you already know the ending of. Driving with nowhere to be. Crying in the bathroom over something completely unrelated to what’s actually bothering you and walking out feeling lighter. Sitting somewhere and realizing you’re in absolutely no hurry to leave. Cleaning your room at midnight because your hands needed something to do and your brain needed to watch something become less chaotic even if that something was just your desk.

None of this is therapy. I want to be honest about that. None of it is doing the work or unpacking anything or getting to the root of whatever is going on. But I think we’ve set this very high bar for what counts as ‘taking care of yourself’ and in doing that, we’ve completely dismissed the small stuff. The accidental stuff. The thirty seconds of actually laughing at a FRIENDS rerun when everything felt too heavy.

Let me tell you, those 30 seconds counted. They got me to 31 seconds and then to the next hour and then to the next day.

I think a lot of us are moving through hard patches waiting for the moment we feel okay in some complete way. Like there’s a version of fine that we’ll eventually arrive at and until then nothing counts. And meanwhile, we’re sitting in the middle of moments that are already offering us something and we’re not letting ourselves take it because it doesn’t look serious enough. It doesn’t look like what healing is supposed to look.

But what if it counts anyway? What if the FRIENDS episode counts? What if the midnight room cleaning counts? What if the cry that came out of nowhere over something you saw while doomscrolling counts?

Because I think if you start looking for those moments instead of waiting for the big feeling of being fixed, you find them more than you expected. And they’re not nothing. On the hard days, they are honestly everything.

You don’t have to have it together. You just have to find the thing that gives you thirty seconds of laughter. And then the next thing. And then the next.

That’s allowed to be enough.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

Outgrowing People Without Hating Them

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There is this one person I think about sometimes. We were inseparable for years, the kind of close where you stop needing to explain context because they already have all of it. They knew which version of a story I was telling based on who was in the room. They knew when I said I was fine that I was not, and they knew when I actually was. We had the kind of friendship that made me think, okay, this is one of those. This one is permanent.

And now we talk maybe four times a year. Warmly, genuinely, and then we hang up and weeks dissolve into months and neither of us panics about it. I am not sure when that happened. I have tried to find the moment and I cannot. There was no fight, no fracture, nothing to point to. Just life doing what life does, pulling people into their own separate currents, and one day you look up and realize the distance has become the default.

What I was not ready for was how much I would still love them through it. That is the part that messes with your head. You expect that if something is over, it should feel over. Clean. You expect the love to scale down to match the closeness. But it does not always work that way. Sometimes you can be sitting in a completely separate life from someone and still feel a rush of something real when you see them post about a good day. Still hope that they are okay. Still miss them in that way you miss a place you used to live in, not desperately, but with a familiarity that never fully leaves your body.

I spent a long time feeling guilty about the growing distance, as if I had let something precious slip through my hands by not holding tighter. I kept thinking I should call more, should try harder, should find my way back to what we were. But every time I imagined actually doing that I felt something in me go still, because I think some part of me knew that you cannot go back to who you were with someone once you have both moved. You can only meet each other as who you are now, and sometimes who you are now just does not need the same things from each other. That is not failure. It took me a while to stop treating it like failure.

The thing about people you outgrow is that they do not leave you, not really. They just stop being in your present and start living somewhere deeper. In the habits you picked up from them without noticing. In the songs that immediately make you think of a specific night, a specific version of yourself, a specific kind of happiness you had that you are not sure you have found again in quite the same shape. I still use a phrase I learned from them. I still order the thing at a restaurant that they recommended years ago. They are woven into the person I became even if they are not around to see who that is now. I find that more comforting than sad, most of the time.

What I am still learning is that love does not need a container. It does not need constant contact to stay alive. You can love someone across years of silence. You can love someone whose life has taken a shape you barely recognize. You can love someone and also accept, without cruelty and without drama, that the two of you have become strangers who share a history. That is a real kind of love. It just looks different from the kind they write about.

I think we put so much pressure on closeness to be the proof of love that we panic when it fades, as if the fading means the whole thing was a lie. But the whole thing was not a lie. Those years were real. That laughter was real. The version of you that existed inside that friendship was real and she mattered and she was not wasted just because she is not who you are anymore. You were supposed to grow. You were supposed to become someone that version of you could not have imagined. And so were they. That is not the end of something beautiful. That is actually kind of what beautiful looks like when it is honest.

I have stopped trying to make peace with it in a way that resolves it, because I do not think it resolves. I think you just learn to carry it differently. A little lighter each year. With more grace and less grief, until it becomes one of those quiet, tender things you hold without needing to look at too often. A warmth in the background. Proof that you have been loved, and that you have loved back, and that both of those things counted even if the story did not go the way you thought it would when you were laughing at 2am thinking, this is one of the ones that lasts.

Maybe it did last. Just not in the way either of you expected.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

3000 followers and a story that was never supposed to make it this far

On By Sync With InkLeave a comment

I keep staring at the number like it’s going to disappear. Like I’ll blink and it’ll go back to 2,999 and I’ll have celebrated for nothing. But it’s real. 3000 people have found their way to this little corner of the internet, and honestly, the fact that it exists at all still surprises me.

Let me take you back, because this story has a lot of false starts.


I created this account on 5th June 2020. Lockdown had just turned the world upside down, and somewhere in all that stillness, an idea started taking shape. I had always loved reading, deeply and consistently, but I had never thought to do anything with it. Books were just mine, private and personal. But suddenly I had time, and silence, and this thought that maybe I could turn something I loved into something real. So I did. I made the account, started posting, and for a few months, it felt like exactly the right thing.


Then on 9th November 2020, I left.


I was in a place where I needed to focus on myself and my studies, and I couldn’t hold both things at once without dropping one of them. So I chose to let this go. At the time, it felt like the responsible thing to do, and I don’t regret it. But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a small ache in walking away from something I’d only just started.


2022 came around and something in me stirred again. On 2nd April, I thought, why not give it another shot? But I couldn’t even get through the month. Something about the timing was off, or maybe I just wasn’t ready, and I closed the door again. After that, I genuinely thought that chapter was over. Not everything needs a comeback. Some things just belong to a certain season of your life, and I made peace with the idea that bookstagram was one of those things for me.


And then 22nd May 2024 happened.


I came back on a complete whim. No plan, no strategy, no goals, no vision board, none of it. What I did have was time, and a need for something steady. Life at that point was uncertain in ways I won’t get into, and I needed one thing I could show up for consistently, something low-stakes enough to be sustainable but meaningful enough to matter. Books had never left me. In fact, 2023 was the year I read the most I ever had in my life. The love was always there. I just needed somewhere to put it again.


I won’t pretend I came back confident, because I didn’t. The space had changed so much since I’d last been here. New faces, new content styles, new ways of doing everything. I felt like I was walking into a room where everyone already knew each other and I was the one squinting at the seating chart. I was unsure of myself, unsure of my place here, unsure if there was even room for what I wanted to do. But underneath all of that was one stubborn little thought: if I actually committed to this, I could make it something great.


So I stayed. I showed up. There were a week or two here and there where life got loud and I went quiet, but not once did the thought of leaving cross my mind. That itself felt new, and significant. Slowly I started finding my footing again, learning the difference between the space I’d left and the one I’d returned to, figuring out what I wanted my presence here to look like.


And now, 3000 followers.


It feels exciting and surreal and, if I’m being completely honest, slightly long overdue. Overdue in the way that feels like relief. Like something finally catching up to the effort. I’m proud of this in a way that’s hard to articulate, not just because of the number, but because of what it took to get here. The stops and starts. The years of walking away. The decision to try again even when I had every reason not to. That persistence means more to me than any milestone.


To everyone who has been here from the early days of this comeback, and to everyone who found me recently and decided to stay, thank you. You have made this space feel worth building. The comments, the recommendations, the DMs, the little conversations about books we loved or didn’t or can’t stop thinking about. That’s what this is really about, and that’s what I want to keep building.


From here, I just want to keep going. More honest reviews, more conversations, more showing up. I came back to this space because I needed something steady, and somewhere along the way it became something I’m genuinely proud of.


Here’s to 3000, and to every number after it.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

I Poured My Heart Into That Post. And Crickets.

On By Sync With InkLeave a comment

Let me tell you what a Sunday afternoon looks like for me.

I have been rearranging the flatlay for forty minutes. The decorative pieces aren’t sitting right, the bookmark keeps slipping out of frame, and the light was perfect twenty minutes ago but now it has shifted and I have missed it. I start over. I find the light again. I take thirty photos to get the one. I edit it until it feels honest, not over-filtered, not flat. Then I sit with a blank caption box and stare at it because I have so much to say and none of the words are landing right. I write it. Delete it. Write it again. Add a line. Remove two. Finally something that sounds like me. Something real. I post it with that small flutter of nervous hope that never quite goes away no matter how long you have been doing this.

And then I wait.

And then I refresh.

And then… not much.

A few likes. The same beautiful, loyal handful who always show up and who I am genuinely grateful for. But the reach is flat. The new eyes aren’t there. The saves, the shares, the sense that something landed the way you hoped it would. Just silence where connection was supposed to be.

Here’s what nobody really talks about: it’s not even about the numbers, not really. It’s about what the numbers represent. Every post is a small act of vulnerability. You took something you loved and you tried to translate that feeling into something shareable. You tried to say, here, this mattered to me, maybe it’ll matter to you too.

And when the algorithm just… doesn’t show it to anyone? It doesn’t feel like a technical glitch. It feels personal. Even when you know it isn’t.

And here is the thing about that silence. It is not neutral. It does not just sit there quietly. It talks. It says things like, maybe you’re not as good as you thought. It says, maybe the books you love are not the right books, the aesthetic is not the right aesthetic, the way you write is not the way people want to read. It picks at everything you were proud of an hour ago and makes it feel small.

That is its own kind of loneliness. And I don’t think we talk about it enough.

Because bookstagram was supposed to be the place where you finally didn’t feel alone in how much you love this. You spent years being the person who read too much, who cried over fictional characters, who wanted to talk about a book long after everyone else had moved on. And then you found this corner of the internet and it felt like coming home. People who got it. People who understood why you needed to sit with a story for days before you could even talk about it. A whole community built around the exact thing that had always made you feel like a little bit of an outsider everywhere else.

So when that community feels suddenly far away, when your posts go quiet and the connection dries up, it does not just feel like a bad metrics week. It feels like losing something. Like the door to that warm room is still there but it is not opening the way it used to and you do not know why and nobody is telling you why and you are starting to wonder if it was ever really open for you at all.

And then on top of the loneliness, there is the burnout. Which is sneaky, because it doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive all at once. It creeps in slowly, disguised as productivity. You start posting more to compensate for the dip. You try reels even though you are a photo person at heart because everyone says that’s what the algorithm wants right now. You study the “best time to post” guides and the “content pillars” advice and the “here’s why your engagement is down” threads until your head is full of strategy and there is barely any room left for the actual love of it. The thing that started all of this.

You pick up a book and for a split second you catch yourself thinking about whether it would make a good photo before you have even read the first page. And that thought stops you cold. Because that was never what this was supposed to be.

The burnout is not laziness. Please hear that. It is what happens when you have been giving and giving, creating and showing up and trying, and the return feels so disproportionate to the effort that your brain and your heart eventually start to protect themselves. It is exhaustion with a creative wound underneath it. And it is incredibly common in this space and almost never spoken about honestly.

I have had nights where I didn’t want to open the app at all. Not because I stopped loving books. Never that. But because the gap between how much I feel when I read and how little seems to translate when I post had gotten so wide it just felt pointless. And feeling pointless about something you love is one of the worst feelings there is.

I have scrolled past accounts with half the effort and twice the reach and felt something uncomfortable move through me that I am not proud of. Not quite jealousy, not quite resentment, something more tangled than both. A kind of confusion about what is actually being rewarded here and why it does not seem to be sincerity or depth or the kind of slow, careful love of literature that drew most of us to this in the first place.

I have posted something I was genuinely proud of and watched it get twelve likes, then posted something throwaway and watched it perform fine, and felt my own instincts start to waver. Start to wonder if I should just make the content that performs instead of the content that means something to me. That is a dangerous road. That is where you lose the plot entirely. That is where you stop being a reader who creates and start being a content machine who occasionally reads.

And I refuse to become that.

Even on the weeks when it would be so much easier to just give in to it.

So where does that leave us?

Honestly, I don’t have a clean answer. I am still in it, same as you. Some weeks the connection comes back and someone leaves a comment that makes me feel seen in a way no like count ever could and I remember exactly why I do this. Some weeks the silence is just loud and I have to sit with it and not let it rewrite the story of why I started.

But I have been trying to hold onto something when I can see clearly: the work was never hollow. That caption I rewrote four times? It was real. That hour spent on the flatlay? It came from genuine love. The algorithm didn’t see it but I made it. And the two or three people who did find it, who commented something beyond an emoji, who sent a DM saying oh my god I felt the same way about that ending — those moments are so disproportionately full compared to the silence around them.

Two or three people is not nothing. Two or three people is someone’s commute becoming bearable because you told them what to read next. Someone picking up a book they would have walked past. Someone feeling less alone in what they are going through because you were honest about what a story did to you. That is not a consolation prize. That is actually the whole point.

Getting back to that truth is not easy and it is not instant. Some days I have to remind myself of it more than once. But I think the way through the burnout, the loneliness, the silence, is not to post more or try harder or crack some code. It is to read something this week just for yourself with zero intention of posting about it. To write a caption because you have something to say, not because the engagement window is open. To reach out to five accounts you genuinely love and just tell them so, with nothing to gain from it.

The community is still there. It is quieter than it used to be, more scattered, harder to find. But it is there. And so is the love that brought you here.

if you’re feeling the exhaustion, the quiet after the post, the creeping doubt — you’re not failing. You’re just human, making something real in a space that wasn’t built to reward that.

Keep going. Not because the numbers will definitely turn around, but because you are a person who loves books deeply and that is worth something that no dashboard can measure. You were that person before the account and you will be that person long after. Do not let a bad month make you forget that.

————

If this hit close to home, please share it with someone who needs to read it today. And if you are in the thick of this right now, I genuinely want to hear from you. Leave a comment. Send a DM. Let’s be in it together instead of suffering through it alone.

— Written at midnight with too many feelings and a book I haven’t posted about yet.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika